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PricewaterhouseCoopers sent out the same old Academy Awards press release last week, touting the firm’s record for no security breaches in the 79 years working with the Oscars in the balloting process. But if everything finally goes fairly smoothly this year, most of the credit belongs to new electronic voting vendor Everyone Counts, Inc.. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences selected Everyone Counts in early 2012 to allow members – who are all over the world – to cast ballots online and, hopefully, faster.

The first round of voting to select the nominees for each category was bumpy, filled with complaints by many members who were confused by multiple layers of security and the challenge of resetting passwords when they didn’t get all the steps of the elaborate new process right.

Members started voting for the winners on February 8. The second round seems to have gone more smoothly.

Even one grumpy director, who had a lot of other frank things to say about the process, told the Hollywood Reporter he had conquered the system.

He opted to vote online rather than via paper ballot -- “because I want to feel young again,” he said with a chuckle -- and did not experience any issues with the voting system.

I’ve heard fewer complaints in the second round of voting. The Academy went out of their way to make sure people knew to vote (emails, robocalls, phone calls, postcards) in order to cut any troubles off at the pass.

After all that effort, Reuters reported PwC said only about 50% of the 5,800 film industry professionals eligible to vote for Oscar winners did so electronically by the last day, February 19. In my experience that’s not a high adoption rate for a software implementation. That’s like hearing you still have to calculate and write half the checks manually even after spending millions on new payroll software. For the Academy, whose members seem to be more intransigent than most, maybe it was “as good as it gets”, for now.

When the Academy announced the move to electronic voting, PwC shared the spotlight as a “partner” to Everyone Counts, on the job to insure nothing bad happened. During an earlier inquiry I uncovered no evidence of an actual contractual partnership between PwC and the software vendor– all parties denied it – but PwC’s extra-audit activities for the Academy lend themselves to this type of hype and misperception.

PwC heavily promotes a seemingly unpaid annual role as the tuxedoed trusted “accountants” who walk, in L.A. of all places, sealed envelopes from two undisclosed locations, partners having committed to memory winners’ names as an extra failsafe, after completing extensive “counting” activities in a secret conclave. Contrast that glamor with the role it does get paid for - statutory auditor and tax preparer for the not-for-profit organization.

PwC’s 2013 press release is stuck on the nostalgia for a way of doing the Oscar ballot business that will disappear. The firm doesn’t mention the electronic voting process and the added complexity this year of counting paper ballots and validating electronic results. For the “accountants” nothing has changed:

PwC continues its traditional role of overseeing all aspects of the voting process: ensuring the integrity and validity of the balloting process, maintaining sole custody of all votes and tabulations, and remaining responsible for the confidentiality of the results.

PwC’s long-established system involves the precise tallying of every single ballot at a concealed location to maintain the utmost level of accuracy, objectivity and confidentiality. Oltmanns and Rosas lead a tight-lipped team of accountants who conduct the same ballot-counting method that they have used for decades.

Not everyone is crazy about “Oscar” lending credibility to a process some say is fraught with danger for voting in real elections, not just an award night for drama kings and queens.

A group of cyber security experts and voting rights advocates released a statement on February 14 warning that Internet voting for this year's Academy Awards should not become a model for public elections. Common Cause, Verified Voting and scientists including Ron Rivest, co-founder of RSA and Verisign and recipient of the Turing Award and Dr. Barbara Simons, former President of ACM and author of “Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?” voiced concerns.

“When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that it would be using an online voting system to help its members choose this year’s Oscar nominees and finalists, thereby adding to the “credibility” of online voting, we found ourselves compelled to remind the general public that it is dangerous to deploy voting by email, efax, or through internet portals in public governmental elections at this time,” the experts said. “Public elections run by municipal, local and state governments should not be compared to elections like the one run by the Academy.”